Tor Snowflake Proxy
snowflake.torproject.org
snowflake.torproject.org
Did cloud providers get more permissive since then?
EDIT: Tor also got hit by some shutdowns in 2018 due to its use of domain fronting:
https://blog.torproject.org/domain-fronting-critical-open-we...
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-launcher/...
From the second link, looks like the plan is that Snowflake will annoy cloud providers less by only using the domain-fronting channel to propagate routing info:
> sending Tor traffic directly through domain fronting (rather than using it only to distribute bridges and snowflakes) enables these platforms to claim that this technique is used by malware and therefore harmful to users, justifying shutting it down.
> Snowflake is a more sustainable way for us to use the expensive but high censorship-resistance features of domain fronting as a low bandwidth bootstrapping channel.
However, I wouldn't consider it "censorship-resistance".
From reading their Technical Overview document, I got the impression that they put a lot of faith on Domain Fronting which might not be a good thing
> ... the censor cannot block the broker without blocking all of Google, or all of Amazon, hence collateral freedom.
Yeah, true ... true ...
https://therecord.media/a-mysterious-threat-actor-is-running...
Edit: I should have just read the documentation [1]. It relies on the STUN/TURN servers being public and commonly used so that blocking them will break many other applications. Unfortunately, I don't know if the regimes where this is needed will care about that.
[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-...
I'd also strongly recommend running a full Tor node. The best way we can support Tor is to flood the zone with proxies, so it's no longer possible for intelligence agencies to control quora of Tor entry and exit nodes, as they very likely do. If you live in the developed world and have a good internet connection, I think it's a civic duty to redistribute your bandwidth - to socialise the means of conduction.
Edit: 'Quora' was probably a poor choice of word, since a quorum implies consensus between nodes, as in a distributed system. It's really about intelligence agencies controlling _majorities_ of nodes - or even a large number - so as to make it more statistically likely that any given Tor circuit will begin and end with a node under one's control.
Better yet just install the Snowflake addon (available for both Firefox and Chrome), so it becomes more of a set-and-forget thing.
Most residential ISPs in the UK default to have filtering enabled, which can be removed by contacting the ISP or via a web form
Google cache of TrendMicro report https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RUzFCa...
Looks like Tor Project is operating with a similar model, using Snowflake proxy users as a sort of broker onto the network.
Clever, but will be interesting to watch how this gets used. My testing so far of the Snowflake broker seems to have attracted less than benign hosts https://twitter.com/aaronsdevera/status/1473354766965035013
Is there a solution yet?
I there a way for me, behind a NAT, to pass an address for someone to connect to a port open on my machine?
(You can also, in these settings, manually forward individual ports, or use DMZ to forward all ports to a single machine.)
Some ISPs don't even give you a real IPv4 address though (they use CGNAT). THEN you have no hope.
That is the case with most people I know: not even the router has a "real ip". Don't know how things have improved with ipv6 though.
Also, in my country, best plans you can get take an optical fiber to your house directly connected to an ISP provided router. You're fully locked out of doing anything with the router except powering it.
If you don't have any control of an IP address, you cannot be connected to through software that is not "special" (i.e., software that only uses IP to connect). As a matter of logic.
Meanwhile, you can pay for your own static IP hosted on a VPS for much less than you can get home internet. You can then forward that IP to your home server.
However, even this cannot scale, it is just rationing through bidding on IP addresses. There are more human beings than IPv4 addresses, so you can't just share them and use "non-special" software. The non-special IPv4 protocol software only supports ~4 billion unique users. So we need "special" IPv6 software or else "special" software layered over IPv4.
Yes... that's basically this. But even a single ipv4 volunteer could expose tens of thousands of ports. Depending on how such a service is desired, this could be enough. Ipv6 would, I think, only improve things.
This is one thing I miss from my dial-up internet in the 90's: I could run a service on my computer, I could pass my ip to anyone, anywhere in the world and they could connect to my machine; a cheap computer using a telephone line. I miss that.
EDIT:
One problem is if your current proxy goes down and you have to change, you might get moved to a different port, which would break existing urls. But maybe it could be part of the protocol that you search for a new proxy that has the same port available.
Dang it now you have me wanting to try and prototype this...
A first-class address+port has to match the protocol, so only one real user per IP.
EDIT:
Also, a home internet connection cannot route thousands of streams simultaneously, so allowing thousands of users one port each does not make sense.
It is always going to be cheaper and more performant to do any kind of forwarding on a rented server in a data center.
I understand this solution, but this is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.
This wiki article covers it all I think.
It is likely to cost less than 10% of your home internet bill to do this.
As for “special”-software-less, you might have to wait for IPV6 and a hosting-friendly ISP.
A VPN provider's business is keeping your connection private. They have no incentive to log because the leakage of such logs would be catastrophic. Thus, a reputable VPN provider is unlikely to be a front for a nation-state actor. There is a strong financial incentive for a VPN provider to do their job, as stated, no conspiracies, and do it well.
Tor, on the other hand, has frequently had bad actors comprise a significant portion of running nodes, to the point where being the victim of a correlation attack wouldn't be unlikely for a regular user. Intelligence agencies and bad actors alike have immense incentive to saturate the Tor network with bad nodes. Finally, Tor has been plagued with issues and vulnerabilities, that they seemingly do not have the manpower or technical ability to fix: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/906-To...
I suspect that the future of anonymous communication will be a mixnet resistant to correlation attacks (unlike Tor.) An example - https://nymtech.net/
My source isn't an open one, but here is one (that sites different cases than I saw): https://restoreprivacy.com/vpn-logs-lies/
Some VPNs have proven no-log in courts, eg PIA.
The VPNs in your article are far from reputable.
If you were to tinfoil hat, you could perhaps argue that this is to make PIA an even more viable honeypot.
Alternatively, if your conspiracies don't run that deep, this makes PIA more trustworthy than the Tor network.
I don't think the OP made a good argument that VPN is a suitable solution, but certainly introducing unnesccessary requirements may be disqualifying a possible working solution.
Now, if the censor has the power to invoke great harm to those attempting to bypass then anonymous browsing is the requirement.
It's probably easier to use and faster for most customers, with the downside that you have to pay.
The point is that we can't easily know who is compromised and who is not. There's always a certain level of trust required. The argument is that if you host your own VPS and use that as exit-node, at least what you're buying is more generic and the VPS provider most likely wouldn't care. But again, it's a matter of trust.
Hence the need to buy from a reputable VPN, based somewhere where gag orders are not legal.
Personally, I'd believe a carefully chosen VPN provider to be more trustworthy than a random selection of Tor nodes.
Take IVPN from example: from what I gather they are among the most reputable. They haven't fucked up yet (a-la Nord VPN), they support and fund anti-censorship activities etc. But all of this is based on a perception, that can be doctored if you're determined enough. And usually in the discussions about VPNs the level of paranoia is pretty high to be trusting others.
Furthermore, the real issue is that VPNs are not that widespread among the "general public" so compromising a VPN (or running a fake one) seems like a good target for those who want to get at the (current) typical users of VPN.
> Intelligence agencies and bad actors alike have immense incentive to saturate the Tor network with bad nodes
Bad node owners largely not cooperate with each other, and this keeps Tor safe.
> the future of anonymous communication will be a mixnet resistant to correlation attacks
I2P has been around for 18 years. Please do use HN to advertise cryptocurrencies.
Between a single malicious node and global observer is the simple act of running many Tor nodes, which is comparatively much cheaper and much easier.
> Bad node owners largely not cooperate with each other, and this keeps Tor safe.
It does not. Nearly 10% of Tor nodes were run by a bad actor at a certain point this year. About 1 in 300 Tor users were completely deanonymized at that point in time. Much more if you use mobile Tor, which doesn't seem to pin a guard node.
"a 16% chance that a Tor user would connect to the Tor network through one of KAX17’s servers, a 35% chance they would pass through one of its middle relays, and up to 5% chance to exit through one." - https://therecord.media/a-mysterious-threat-actor-is-running...
I don't know about you, but a 0.3% chance of deanonymization on every route change is pretty unacceptable.
> I2P has been around for 18 years.
I2P is not well maintained, it is not a mixnet, and it does not have the same security guarantees as the Nym mixnet.
https://blog.nymtech.net/vpns-tor-i2p-how-does-nym-compare-8...
> Please do use HN to advertise cryptocurrencies.
Please do not accuse HNers of "advertising cryptocurrencies."
Merely mentioning the existence of a tokenized mixnet is not advertisement. We are allowed to talk about obviously relevant technologies, especially ones that improve on existing ones in novel ways.
And very ineffective, compared to a global observer like PRISM. Tor makes no secret that real time traffic is vulnerable to correlation attacks.
It's not a "bug" in Tor, it's true for any data transmission. And VPNs are way, way more vulnerable to such attack.
> I don't know about you, but a 0.3% chance of deanonymization on every route change is pretty unacceptable.
"unacceptable" is as strange word to use when there are no practical alternatives.
Tor would be more resilient if a large number of organizations and individuals ran their own nodes. We can encourage participation. Other than that, the best thing we can do is develop store-and-forward systems on top of Tor that resist timing attacks. Briar is a good example.
I am not talking about correlation attacks, but total deanonymization.
Completely deanonymizing 1 in 300 connections is not "ineffective." You'd catch a lot of regular Tor users, which would likely be your target anyways.
> And VPNs are way, way more vulnerable to such attack.
I cannot run malicious VPN nodes for other users of my VPN. It isn't vulnerable to the attack at all.
> "unacceptable" is as strange word to use when there are no practical alternatives.
A trustworthy no-logs VPN is a perfect alternative.
In places where your government is this hostile and you’re doing something subversive you’re probably using an onion service or i2p which vpns cannot access.
A single vpn provider would be way lower hanging fruit to powerful adversaries.
There’s a reason high profile criminal groups are able to operate over tor. When they DO get caught, it’s usually through some other unrelated opsec blunder.
I use tor, ProtonVPN, and mullvad in addition to self managed wire guard instances. There’s no reason to be binary and you should use the tools which fit your use case.
1 in 300 connections were deanonymized at many points throughout this year.
For any given trustworthy VPN, 0 connections were deanonymized this year.
A truly trustworthy VPN is more trustworthy than Tor.
How do you figure? If you are referencing the bs “0.3%” chance figure. Please not that this assumes that each “peak” number of malicious nodes were used. If you actually look at that medium article, the peak exit, relay, and entry nodes do not occur at the same time. Those malicious nodes have since been removed. This also assumes tor users are not using any onion services.
> For any given trustworthy VPN, 0 connections were deanonymized this year.
Lol. I can’t believe I even have to respond to this. People use vpns to visit clear net sites with loads of fingerprinting JavaScript. They bring their google analytics cookies with them! There’s no onion services!
I'm still not convinced incidentally. State actors have very strong motivations to break Tor, regardless of difficulty, and have ample resources. They can also be very patient, as projects like Stuxnet demonstrated. [0] Doing something surprising is good military strategy as Guderian demonstrated in the Ardennes. [1]
US intelligence already has plenty of surveillance capabilities and imo they’re not gonna waste their hand targeting non enemies of the state who just want privacy or even organized crime rings who are just chasing a profit.
Frankly it’s easier to catch high profile criminals with more conventional means.
And just to reiterate: my position is not that tor is bulletproof against the most powerful military force in history. I’m just saying it provides a much higher degree of privacy compared to using a simple VPN provider.
Anyone can help strengthen the network by operating nodes, donating money, or assisting with development/documentation!
https://nusenu.medium.com/is-kax17-performing-de-anonymizati...